Electronic Book Review - born-digitalhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/born-digital
enSpeculative Aesthetics: Whereto the Humanities?http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/archeospeculation
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Maria Engberg</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2014-05-07</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>At first glance, Johanna Drucker’s <span class="booktitle">Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing</span> and C. T. Funkhouser’s <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms</span>, 1959-1995 seem to be at opposite ends of a broad spectrum of digital literary concerns in our contemporary technocultural moment. Drucker’s <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span> documents a decade-long experiment using digital technology as method and analytic provocateur for the study of (the experience of) print literature. At the other end of the spectrum, Funkhouser’s <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry</span> is an excavation of born-digital poetry works from the end of the 1950s onward. Drucker’s book is testament to the challenges that digital media can pose for the foundations of humanities, whereas a chronicling of born-digital literary and artistic works most concerns Funkhouser. Both books, however, engage with what we could call speculative literary practices, critical and creative. Drucker’s own definition of speculative computing as a project that “[pushes] subjective and probabilistic concepts of knowledge as experience (partial, situated, and subjective) against objective and mechanistic claims for knowledge as information (total, managed, and externalized” (5), foregrounds the division between humanities hermeneutics on the one hand and the epistemological foundations of computation on the other. This division seems to be haunting digital literature scholarship as well.</p>
<p>Both books exemplify the growing awareness of and need for a sophisticated understanding of the materiality of literature. How does a literary artifact or event come into being, and how is it received by an interpreting subject? This dialectic, most clearly argued in Drucker’s book but also evident in Funkhouser’s descriptions of pre-web digital poetry, poses challenges to literary studies today. It is in the scope of this dialectic that the two books work.</p>
<p>Drucker starts her chronicle of the 10-year project <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span> (short for Speculative Computing Laboratory) at the University of Virginia by positing digital humanities versus speculative computing. The former, she argues, is “instrumental, well-formed, and increasingly standardized” (19) whereas the latter imports the dimension of subjectivity of interpretation into data work, particularly into working with visualization and interfaces. The lab’s best known project, Ivanhoe, was built so that it would “provoke questions” (67) about the “intersubjective condition of [texts’] production and reception, and the ways their material existence is conditioned upon a discourse field” (67). <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span>, then, investigates the contact zone for the humanities in which visual art, information design, computer science and computer graphics, and cognitive sciences meet. According to Drucker, it is at this meeting point that we need to understand how unquestioned mathematical assumptions of computation prevent us from building and using tools that can instead account for texts as dynamic processes of subject, object and interpretation relating to each other. Drucker calls this relation “trialectics,” building on Peirce’s tripartite understanding of the sign.</p>
<p>In her attempt to shift the comfortable grounds upon which (unchallenged) theoretical claims stand, Drucker creates a set of “near, but not quite” concepts: <span class="lightEmphasis">aesthesis</span> (instead of aesthetics), <span class="lightEmphasis">graphesis</span> (instead of graphics or visuality), <span class="lightEmphasis">mathesis</span>(to stand in for a particular kind of mathematically grounded thought). The nomenclature may seem jarring, and that is presumably part of its purpose, but it can also be alienating for some readers, as a recent <a href="http://www.leoalmanac.org/images/articles/Leonardo_Reviews_Mojica_II_2.pdf" class="outbound">review</a> in <span class="booktitle">Leonardo</span> evidences.<cite id="note_1" class="note">The reviewer seems confused by the intentionally provocative theoretical stance that Drucker assumes, and thus comes across as reading <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span> in complete alignment with unquestioned notions of mathesis (the self-identity of code for instance). The reviewer therefore seems to miss the main point of the book: to challenge some of the basic tenets of digital technology and humanities scholarship by way of allowing them to engage with each other in a critical and, to use Drucker’s preferred term, “speculative” manner.</cite> However, this shift in vocabulary does prompt the reader to rethink what goes into a process of interpretation, asking questions such as, how should we understand the value of visual information, such as interface design?</p>
<p>There are some central essays enunciating clearly and perhaps provocatively for some readers the philosophical tenets of Drucker’s thinking about digital artifacts. “From Aesthetics to Aesthesis” outlines the path by which she came to understand digital projects as “rhetorical instruments,” focusing not on their form but their existence as “models of knowledge production and representation situations.” Note the use of <span class="lightEmphasis">situation</span>. Drucker reiterates throughout <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span>’s various essays the importance of understanding digital media work as a way “to provide embodied expressions of experience and knowledge” (128) based in the realization that a “visual form does something, rather than that it is something” (75, emphasis in original). “The ‘Patacritical Demon” recounts Drucker’s theoretical understanding of signs and of reading. “Graphesis and Code” applies this argument to the realm of images.</p>
<p>The case studies discussed are both theoretical and practical explorations realized through drawings, rhetoric, and software. Ivanhoe, the ‘Patacritical Demon, Temporal Modeling, Subjective Meterology, and the structure of the artists’ books digital archive ABsOnline, are all examples of outcomes from <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span>’s work. With her main collaborators, Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, Drucker designed these projects to examine the foundations of humanities research as it encountered electronic environments, particularly seeking to understand how the “interpretative task of the humanist is redefined in these changed conditions [of those environments]” (xii). The object of study in <span class="booktitle">Speclab</span> was generally literature in print - the 19th century novels that populated the Ivanhoe game or the artists’ books that Drucker both makes herself and collects. Even so, the investment in understanding how computational media form aesthetic objects and events is something Drucker shares with C.T. Funkhouser.</p>
<p>Born-digital poetry (although sometimes printed out and disseminated on paper) is Funkhouser’s focus. His <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry</span> painstakingly maps the early history of what only later became known as digital (or electronic) poetry. As the title suggests, important expressive literary works were created by means of digital computers as early as 1959. <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry</span> excavates a history of works that were forgotten by many and are still accessible to very few. A literary paleontologist by his own admission, Funkhouser has written a book that is, as Sandy Baldwin’s eloquent foreword notes, fundamentally open, as is evidenced by the fact that the examples of innovative poetries range from print to digital to oral. The aim, according to Funkhouser, is not to provide a set definition of what digital poetry is, or more correctly, has been, but rather to explore the various ways in which poetic experimentation intersects with digital technology. In so doing, Funkhouser relies on categories or genres that have become recognizable in the field: hypertext and hypermedia, codeworks, visual and kinetic poetry, and text generation. The last is presented as the origination of digital poetry. Funkhouser close reads works of these various genres and discusses their “technological foundations” and historical contexts, always with detailed description of a poem’s artifice.</p>
<p>Like Loss Pequeño Glazier before him, Funkhouser situates the aesthetic antecedents of digital poetry in various avant-garde practices of the 20th century. Following what has now become a common description of digital poetry’s lineage, <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry</span> too juxtaposes Mallarmé, Dada, and the various Concretist movements with digital poems that seem to carry out similar aesthetic and poetic agendas or explorations. Throughout the five chapters and two coda sections, Funkhouser compares the poetics and textual condition of various digital works with forebears among the avant-garde. Visual and kinetic digital poems, by such poets as Jim Andrews, Harry Polkinhorn, bpNichol, Philippe Bootz and E.M. Melo e Castro, are read in direct relation to Concrete poetry and Mallarmé’s <span class="booktitle">Un Coup de Des</span>; hypertext and hypermedia in relation to Nelson’s original idea for hypertext. In the “Techniques Enabled” chapter, which moves beyond the title’s stop-date 1995, Funkhouser still maintains that although innovation and exploration of the properties of digital media continue (particularly in terms of reader interactivity), “one cannot successfully argue … that the works produced for the WWW radically advance poetic form” (235). Technologically and poetically, for Funkhouser, many of the ideas of digital poetry existed in previous artistic forms, stemming from modernist traditions.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry</span>, Funkhouser explicitly and repeatedly aligns digital poetry with modernism and postmodernism: “[t]he aesthetics of digital poetry are an extension of modernist techniques” and theoretically digital works are “in many ways typical of the postmodern condition of the text” (3). While this may be true for the poetry that Funkhouser spends most of the book analyzing, his conviction that those works “set the stage for contemporary works and can be used as a reference point for future forms” (8) is more doubtful. There are already digital poetic works that do not readily adhere to avant-garde aesthetic principles or political aims (works by Jason Nelson and Andy Campbell, among others, come to mind.)</p>
<p>This caveat aside, Funkhouser’s close readings of the poems and the historical situation in which they emerged provide an important source for both students and scholars. His insider’s view allows him to relate to events as they happened, and his training in particularly American experimental poetry (print and digital, as a poet and a scholar) provide him with a sophisticated context for understanding the poetic explorations of digital media as they became available for use in those early decades. A detail that will surely become important for future scholars is Funkhouser’s careful descriptions of related events and material, such as performances (for instance, Jim Rosenberg performing his highly visual poetry without access to a projector) or the role played by email and listservs in discussing and disseminating material. The catalogue of detail and the wealth of contextual material - while at times cumbersome for a reader who wants to read the book straight through - will be crucial for scholars long after the poems themselves are lost or inaccessible.</p>
<p>A word on terminology. The use of quotation marks around central concepts suggests a desire to disassociate oneself from them. In digital scholarship, they can point to our current dissatisfaction with, or increasing awareness of, the problematic nature of concepts’ perceived stable interpretative projective power in relationship to the dynamic processes of change in both the object itself and the interpretations of text. In Drucker’s “text,” “work,” “book,” and in Funkhouser’s “form” (1), “readings” (6) are such moments of “dissatisfaction.” These are pretty central words to be dissatisfied with, indeed. Drucker supplies some new terms, such as <span class="lightEmphasis">graphesis</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">mathesis</span>, <span class="lightEmphasis">aesthesis</span>and <span class="lightEmphasis">speculative computing</span>. Interestingly, in Funkhouser’s book, for all its examples of experimental early digital works, poetry is not put under scrutiny as a concept, although that can be argued to be an outcome (if not direct aim) of many works that are grouped under the terms “digital poetry” or “electronic poetry.” We have to look elsewhere for analyses that explore critically what “poetry” or, rather, poetics, is in the digital age, with writers such as Alan Sondheim, Talan Memmott, Sandy Baldwin (<a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/absorbant" class="inbound">here</a> and <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/circulatory" class="inbound">here</a>), or indeed in some of Funkhouser’s <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bergen2nx1.doc" class="outbound">other</a> writings.<cite id="note_2" class="note">See for instance Talan Memmott “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading”in <span class="booktitle">New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories</span>. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, eds. (MIT Press, 2006); Alan Sondheim’s <span class="booktitle">The Internet Text</span>; Sandy Baldwin’s “Against Digital Poetics” and “Ping Poetics,” both in <span class="booktitle">ebr</span>; and Chris Funkhouser’s “Cannibalistic Tendencies in Digital Poetry: Recent Observations and Personal Practices.”</cite></p>
<h2>The Social Network - What Is Coming?</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Speclab</span> and <span class="booktitle">Prehistoric Digital Poetry</span> both describe a (fairly recent) history of literary-technical experimentations and explorations. They present - implicitly or explicitly - models for much needed reconfigurations of humanities scholarship in the digital age, in terms of what we study and how we study it. Presently, digital techno-culture seems to be preoccupied with the notion of the “digital social.” With Hollywood films seeking to capture what our contemporary moment is about (e.g. <span class="filmtitle">Inception</span> 2009; <span class="filmtitle">The Social Network</span> 2010), <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html" class="outbound">newspapers</a> and magazines discussing the possibilities for large scale data analysis and visualization for humanities scholarship<cite id="note_3" class="note">See for instance “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches” by Patricia Cohen. November 16, 2010 <span class="booktitle">The New York Times</span>. The Software Studies Initiative at UCSD (director Lev Manovich) is an interesting take on what visualization may mean for humanities scholarship: <a href="http://lab.softwarestudies">http://lab.softwarestudies</a>.</cite> - and we still hear <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/" class="outbound">warning voices</a> about the damning consequences of digital technology for our very being, our thinking, and our ability to remember and reason<cite id="note_4" class="note">See Nicholas Carr, <span class="booktitle">The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains</span> (W.W. Norton, 2010), and his preceding article in <span class="booktitle">The Atlantic</span>: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” July/August 2008.</cite>- it seems urgent for humanities scholars to turn their gaze toward digital culture as a <a href="http://www.artsofthepresent.org/" class="outbound">(difficult) whole</a><cite id="note_5" class="note">I take the term “a difficult whole” from Brian McHale’s <span class="booktitle">The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems</span>. (University of Alabama Press, 2004). McHale has himself borrowed the term from Robert Venturi. The recently formed ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (of which McHale is a member) argues in their mission statement that, “We need to work together to grasp the arts of the present as a (difficult) whole” referring both to the contemporary cultural situation of global digital culture and the academic need for the study of the present in the arts.</cite> Due to the specific scopes of the two books, and the time in which they were thought of and written (Funkhouser’s project, in particular, with roots in his mid-1990s PhD dissertation), neither text engages with the Internet’s latest social “revolution.” Although networked writing initiatives are discussed in both Funkhouser and Drucker, social media forms do not appear, for obvious reasons. Authorial function is more or less intact in both books, with a focus on a (singular) reader’s embodied and intellectual participation in the process of interpretation. This tripartite reading situation of object (and implicitly an authorial function), reader, and one or a series of reading situations, implicitly sets the books’ view of contemporary culture against the fake-anonymous crowds of social media in which individual users (while often not anonymous) assume the role of an individualized character in a digital swarm.<cite id="note_6" class="note">An interesting corollary to the idea of plenitude and masses in our culture can be found in the cinematic digital crowd or swarm of Hollywood movies that Kristen Whissel analyzes in her recent article “The Digital Multitude” <span class="booktitle">Cinema Journal</span>, Volume 49, Number 4, Summer 2010, pp. 90-110.</cite> A challenging notion for both scholars and artists to take up, then, is that social media seems to speak against the strong authoritative force and artistic drive behind the works that both Drucker (artists’ books) and Funkhouser (digital poetry) discuss. The modernist poetics of digital poetry that Funkhouser describes, not incorrectly, is largely incompatible with the contemporary social creativity (for lack of a better term) of YouTube mashup videos, Facebook status update string narratives, Twitter feeds, and locative mobile “app-experiences” with their motley aesthetic and political pedigrees and agendas, unclear sender and reader positions (endlessly multiple), and transient status as objects.</p>
<p>Digitality has already profoundly changed the circumstances of human life (a claim that seems both preposterously overextended and mundanely accurate) and humanities scholars are grappling with the implications for our particular niche of cultural analytical practice. Through their thinking and in the shape of their individual projects, Drucker and Funkhouser provide models for continued collaborative work among humanities scholars and creative practitioners. Something is happening to literature, art, film, games - in short, to contemporary culture’s creative practices. Although not directly dealing with the contemporary moment, Funkhouser points to a recent history of similar experimentations that foreshadowed some of what we see in more mainstream forums today, and in so doing shows how important historical awareness is. Drucker exemplifies how scholarship can be and is challenged by digital technologies - if one understands certain philosophical biases embedded in their structures and interfaces. The contemporary digital moment, quite different from the one that shaped both of these books, continue to open up possibilities for cultural and critical production and challenge us to think with and beyond Funkhouser and Drucker.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/digital-humanities">digital humanities</a>, <a href="/tags/born-digital">born-digital</a>, <a href="/tags/antecedents">antecedents</a></div></div></div>Wed, 07 May 2014 17:32:50 +0000EBR Administrator2417 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/archeospeculation#commentsNew Media: Its Utility and Liability for Literature and for Lifehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/remixed
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joseph Tabbi</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2012-03-07</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"? The following meta tags are optional and are just for your internal use. The "name" tag is the former "lettercode". The author tag is the author's name. Don't edit this next tag --><div id="main">
<h2>PREFACE</h2>
<p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">Beginning with the title, a variation on Nietzsche’s “Use and Abuse of History for Life,” this paper offers a practice-based theory of how new media writing and traditional prose scholarship might converge. The essay itself will be in the form of a literary remix. Hence, the author’s own sense of the affordances and constraints of new media will be conveyed primarily through the words of Nietzsche as well as selected works of critical writing in and about new media. One of the essay’s themes is already evident in the essay’s derivative form - namely, that the only way that literature can in fact “afford” to work in and around new media is to identify its enabling constraints, and to work through them with the self-consciousness and potential for collaborative thought that has always been present in prose fiction in print - but needn’t be unique to that medium.</span></em></p>
<h2>FORWARD</h2>
<p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">“Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity.”</span></em> These are Goethe’s words, cited by Nietzsche and translated by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, Canada (XHTML markup in March 2005, accessed in the Spring of 2011). The translation, unlike Nietzsche’s citation in the nineteenth century of an author from the previous century, is available online with links to explanatory notes. With them, as with all seamless web productions, our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of new media might begin.</p>
<p>At least, it was our intention to begin this way, using the potential of new media to bring works of the past and present into conversation with one another, together with scholarship on the work. Our expectations, as scholars, were at once modest and potentially transforming - in keeping with, for example, Ted Nelson’s vision of hypertext as a common workplace where texts and annotations could be held together in an extended, readily searchable network.<cite id="note_1" class="note">See Tabbi, “Electronic Literature as World Literature, or: “The University of Writing Under Constraint.”</cite> The record of a scholar’s writings <em>and</em> findings then could be conveyed, in total, to other scholars having similar interests. Unfortunately, in our own online practice (which we imagined would carry Nelson’s foundational work forward), such uses have proven to be quite rare. Our present engagement with Nietzsche will be no exception.<cite id="note_2" class="note">When we renewed our search for Nietzsche’s classic essay a few months later, what we found was another version, an e-text for Arthur’s Classic Novels, which includes no links and identifies the translator as residing in Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, Canada. The translator may have relocated, or the University itself may have been moved or mis-named or it’s name may have changed. That sort of impermanence is normal in life and cannot be a scholar’s main concern. The sudden proliferation of competing texts, however, <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> a concern. Regarding the Johnston translation: our German is not adequate to judge its quality and, in any case, our encounters with this text in various English language transitions and in partial citations over the past three decades has produced in our own mind a composite whose relation to Nietzsche’s original is tenuous at best. My title, for example, comes not from Johnston but rather from William Paulson. Paulson’s choice of “utility” and “liability” rather than the more frequent “use” and “abuse” is helpful in avoiding sexual overtones in Nietzsche’s writing that, whether they are present in Nietzsche’s own thought or in the thought of his interpreters, can distract from his work’s relevance for our current concern - namely, the survival of literature and its institutions in the current media environment.</cite> Versions of Nietzsche’s work now turn up as e-books for downloading. Some are pdf’s and no better than printed books for a scholar intending a liberal cut-and-paste job; some are free of charge and protected for full or partial citation and remixing; others are available commercially, copyrighted and write-protected: the notes, the links, the generous, freely offered historical and critical scholarship with which we had meant to begin, are all stripped from the commercial versions. Nietzsche discussion groups abound.</p>
<p>I have tried to describe a feeling which has often enough tormented me: I take revenge on this feeling when I expose it to the general public. For this work is to set down why, in the spirit of Goethe’s words, we must in all seriousness despise new media textual production, knowledge which enervates activity, and new media as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we still lack what is most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential: namely, citability, interoperability, and the all-important textual stability necessary to <em><span class="lightEmphasis">hold in mind</span></em> the words of our colleagues from the past and into the present. When Nietzsche in 1873 cited Goethe’s words from the previous century, presumably literary scholars had already begun annotating the canonical author. Granted, the word, “canonical,” in relation to secular authors, had not yet widely entered scholarly parlance: that would happen during our own present, when the notion of a literary canon would be challenged - first by revisionist scholars, and then (definitively) by new media. Goethe’s greatness, and the need for great authors generally, was in no small part a necessity constructed by a rising nationalism - intensified in a country such as Nietzsche’s Germany that came to nationhood later than most European countries.<cite id="note_3" class="note">As one commentator points out, Nietzsche was writing just a few years after “the creation of the Second Reich” under Otto Von Bismark. See Scott Horton, <span class="booktitle">Harper’s</span> August 2008. ONLINE at <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001025" class="outbound">http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001025 </a></cite> Indeed, the need for “great authors,” like the need for military conquests, monumental achievements, and authentic national traits, can be seen (retrospectively) as the kind of mis-use of history that Nietzsche warns against. Nietzsche himself, notoriously, would be mis-used in the century after his death, by those finding support for Nazism in his admiration of forgetful action and blind passion, his preference for action over the slow workings of justice.</p>
<p>We have succeeded in removing canonicity from our discourse; we have in fact removed all appeal to cultural authority not least because of its demonstrable mis-use in past nationalist formations - not only the German nation-state of of the 1930s and 1940s, but also in Russia which, like Germany, emerged as a nation (and then a short-lived empire) later than its European counterparts. The establishment of Pushkin and Tolstoy in positions of cultural authority was as much a political development as a cultural one, and their centrality proved useful throughout the Soviet period. During the Cold War, George Steiner could pose world-political alternatives by titling his first book, <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Tolstoy or Dostoyevski</span></strong></em>. That was one among a relatively few realistic, world-historical choices available then, in 1960. Today, our choices have multiplied, as the number of “imagined communities” has expanded (Anderson). But we no longer look to criticism, to distinguish among personal choices and gathering tendencies within a culture or collective: here everything is simply taken as equally worthy of reverence, but everything which does not fit this respect for “difference,” like the new or the coming into being of a cultural consciousness, is rejected and treated as hostile.</p>
<p>Equally significant was Steiner’s sub-title to the second edition, <em><strong><span class="booktitle">An Essay in the Old Criticism</span> </strong></em>(Yale University Press). In posing literary alternatives as having consequences for life, Steiner was writing against his time - which is to say, against the “new criticism” that was then current in the United States. A critical practice grounded in close readings of works regarded as autonomous, the new criticism had the virtue of avoiding paraphrase and author biographies (“the dust of biographical rubbish,” in Nietzsche’s words-in-translation). If New Criticism rightly separated works from tedious historicization and avoided tendentious political positioning, it could often court the opposite risk of separating the work from its real life consequences. These involve an author’s or a reader’s choosing <em><span class="lightEmphasis">this</span></em> work, rather than another; working for the moment in <em><span class="lightEmphasis">this</span></em> language, not another; and following <em><span class="lightEmphasis">this</span></em> worldview, however much one might denigrate or respect another.</p>
<p>This essay is also out of touch with the times because here I am trying for once to see as a contemporary disgrace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age is justifiably proud, its new media culture. For I believe, in fact, that we are all suffering from a consumptive historical fever and at the very least should recognize that we are afflicted with it. If Goethe with good reason said that with our virtues we simultaneously cultivate our faults and if, as everyone knows, a hypertrophic virtue (as the worldwide transactional mediation of our age appears to me to be) can serve to destroy a people just as well as a hypertrophic vice, then people may make allowance for me this once. Insofar as I am a student of print literature, particularly those works of the 1960s and 70s in the United States that already, collectively, deconstructed the Western literary canon, I am not a child of new media practices who can pretend to know nothing of its antecedents. But I need to ascribe this much to myself on account of my profession as a print-era literary scholar, for I have no idea what the significance of print criticism would be in our age, if not to have an untimely effect - that is, to work against the time and thereby have an effect upon it, hopefully for the benefit of a future time.</p>
<h2>I</h2>
<p>Observe the multitude which is online with you at this moment. Send any one of them in any place anywhere an image or text. Do not be concerned about his, her, or your linguistic capacities: at either end, we will have the option of translating our correspondence instantly into any language, from Africans, Albanian, or Arabic to Vietnamese, Welsh, or Yiddish. The transactional value of such multilingual communication is by now proven. The cultural value, however, of multiplying literacies for literature and for life in our post-nationalist times is not so great as we might think. The hundreds of different languages accommodated by new media, however democratic in the abstract, hold scarcely any potential for community formation <em><span class="lightEmphasis">across</span></em> languages, except in the primitive sense that any language corresponds to the same typically permanent needs of people. If we can now translate among languages automatically and nearly instantly, what of it? Anyone who understood these prior needs could learn nothing new from all the languages. In the same way, the super-historical thinker, working without electronic mediation, can readily illuminate from within herself all the histories of people and of individuals, guessing like a clairvoyant the original sense of the different hieroglyphics. Gradually, even she will grow tired and do what she can to avoid the constantly new streams of written signals streaming forth.</p>
<p>Cultural differences, the moment they are translated and offered for exchange, relapse into more of the same. It is no different for authorship that grounds itself not in a developing language but rather an identity or (what amounts to the same thing) a remix of available <em><span class="lightEmphasis">patois</span></em> and cultural identifiers. The contemporary choice among a multiplicity of authors using different languages deriving from various named cultures, and the hesitation among scholars to identify, let alone judge, contrasting world views, turns us away from participation in an imagined community of authors ideally writing in a single evolving language for a common audience. That commonality was certainly imaginary, no less than the idea that one’s authorship would contribute to the life of a language (as our words take form in other minds, the minds of our eventual readers fluent in this language). There never was, in actual fact, a literary commons with laws, rights, rites of recognition, and rules of inheritance comparable to the nation state; there never was, in Pascal Casanova’s formulation, a <em><span class="lightEmphasis">world republic of letters</span></em>. But this literary extension of the state was nonetheless worth imagining - unlike the current multiplication of languages and discourses which are instantly translatable and can be understood, <em><span class="lightEmphasis">literally</span></em> by any person anywhere using new media.</p>
<p>Our present literary communities, like our “born digital” texts, appear to have no need for imagination at all. What we have, instead of Goethe’s world literature, Casanova’s world republic, or Anderson’s imagined communities, are <em><span class="lightEmphasis">communities of interests</span></em>: professional, functionally differentiated communities within a strictly limited sphere of action, whose work is addressed to very specific audiences speaking any language and taking an undifferentiated interest in any culture. No language or literature can come to us from the inalterable past, and nothing is foreign. Anyone who has learned to recognize the sense of literature in the old way must get annoyed to see inquisitive students “googling” an author’s professional and biographical details, or to see painstaking forensic researchers clambering all over the code of a born digital literary work that has appeared only yesterday but has likely been rendered obsolescent by changes overnight in format. The sole requirement of new media is that it must be, perpetually, <em><span class="lightEmphasis">new; that is, it exists within that region of media that always wants to be new</span></em> (Heckman): to be timely, to be turning up on the top page of search engines. Hence we study, not the development of a common language among a multitude of potentially communicating minds but rather layers on layers of superseded code, as if these supports to communication were among the heaped up art treasures in a gallery.</p>
<p>They are only traces in silicon, these codes that we expend so much energy mastering, over and again with each upgrade or market failure. But unlike earlier traces in sand, in erased and reused parchments, or for that matter in the self-renewing circuits of memory in a human brain, the traces encoded in new media <em><span class="lightEmphasis">never disappear</span></em>. This principle, which comes as a surprise to anyone who has “lost” the contents of a hard-drive, is the foundation of a <em><span class="lightEmphasis">forensic</span></em> criticism (Kirschenbaum). In new media, the past is never written over, and hence no feeling for the past (or for our own present vulnerabilities) can develop. Not in the way that the history of one’s own city, for example, can become for us the history of ourselves. We understand the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival as if these were pages in an illustrated diary of our youth. We rediscover in the formative age of our cities all the force, purpose, passion, set opinion, foolishness, and bad habits of our own youth. We say to ourselves, here we could live, for here it is possible to live, and here we can go on living, because we are tenacious and (unlike our continually updated media) we do not collapse overnight. But neither do we hold on forever, and this capacity to perish, to relinquish our life narratives and let go of our historical consciousness, makes possible a living history that new media denies with its eternal, literal, uncommunicating memory.</p>
<h2>II</h2>
<p>In the past lives of cities, as in our own lives, we might seek the seeds of a narrative. We might even imagine that such a narrative is necessary for our happiness, for our feeling of being at home in the world, for our belonging to history. Nietzsche himself implies that a personal narrative is needful in our lives - that, without the ability to see our lives as a story in progress, our lives are in a sense incomplete, rootless, or unworthy. Still, even as our participation in a national community is largely imaginary, so too is our relation to our own life narratives. Nietzsche knows this, and he knows also that our narratives, and all the burdens of memory they place on us, do not in most instances make us happy. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (“all false,” as Thomas Pynchon says in <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span></strong></em>), can also be, like new media, expensive superfluities - and in any case there is no particular cognitive or aesthetic reason why we should insist on shaping our lives and our literature in narrative form. The majority of lives, and arguably the majority of literary fictions throughout history, has been decidedly non-narrative.</p>
<p>And new media fiction? This, too, seemed at first to be a welcome avoidance of narrative form, a return to the episodic, epistolary, and encyclopedic wellsprings of literary innovation. Early criticism (by Bolter, Cayley, Grusin, Harpold, Joyce, Landow, and others), tended to emphasize the “non-linearity” and “open-ended,” quality of pioneering fictions and poetries written in new media. They were not mistaken in this: Authors of electronic literature, working in digital environments that, like the human brain, are also layered and multi-mediated, tended to eschew conventional, linear plot lines for hypertextual, hypermediated narratives in which language is a minority element, a niche within the overall mental and medial ecology.</p>
<p>(But language, which we imagine ourselves to be speaking, more likely speaks <em><span class="lightEmphasis">us</span></em>: Ulmer’s approach to new media as an engine for the generation of neologisms, puns, and so forth, is one example of a literary development that is distinctly non-narrative: the only difference between our evolving languages then and now, is that new media can trace the development of keywords and contexts, unlike the transformation of words over time in human minds and spoken by human tongues: will we go on neglecting this admirably objective, empirical study of our language’s current evolution in favor of a continued pursuit of online stories, public personae, goal-oriented gaming, and role-playing without rapport?)</p>
<p>The mistake made by first-generation hypertext critics - some of them, and not for long - was to reify the print medium, the better to contrast the emerging (but also short-lived) forms of programmable, born digital literature. It was immensely satisfying, but wrong, to suppose that the presentation of lines of text in print literature could determine, or somehow direct, literary writing towards linear narratives with clear beginnings, an expansion of narrative possibilities consistent with the accumulation of pages, and a subsequent reduction of these possibilities toward inevitabilities (in marriage, death, education, a clear rise or fall in a character’s class position - things connected not to the human condition as such, but more likely to conditions of capitalism and an expanding middle class that not only allowed, but <em><span class="lightEmphasis">necessitated</span></em>, unending life-transformation). The need to <em><span class="lightEmphasis">account for</span></em> one’s own life changes had much more to do with the ideology<cite id="note_4" class="note">While we’re on the topic of ideology, we might point out the very brief advocacy in new media cultural criticism of a kind of liberatory economic determinism. Consistent with the idea that text-block assemblies would of themselves move new media writing away from narrative linearities, was the notion that the reproducibility of electronic content would somehow urge new media away from the commodity form and in the direction of a gift economy. Granted, one can have the text or file that one has sent, and one can in theory send texts to the entire world, but generally one does not own the interface unless it is built to be shared, open sourced, and interoperable. Even academia, which maintains a gift economy among libraries, has developed a hitherto unheard of monopoly of traditional literary critical content in the Johns Hopkins University Project Muse. My own university subscribes, no doubt, but as my own writing life takes place largely away from the university, I doubt that I have ever read past the few opening lines of any of the thousands of essays that Hopkins makes unavailable to ordinary readers connected to the Internet.</cite> of <em><span class="lightEmphasis">nineteenth-century realist fiction</span></em>, than they ever had to do with the medial form of print: Stern, no less than Pynchon, demonstrates print’s perfect compatibility with disjunctions and nonlinearities that are now endemic to new media. The physical enclosure of a codex does not in itself guarantee narrative closure, and printed text itself, due to variations in type setting and the proliferation of multiple, often unauthorized editions, is less stable than we might think (as Adrian Johns has shown in <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Nature of the Book</span></strong></em>).</p>
<p>Still less should new media be made to reinforce nineteenth century realism, that one relatively brief narrative turn in the history of literary fiction. (Recognizing this brevity, in relation to the longer tradition of non-narrative fiction, is part of what makes Steven Moore’s encyclopedic work on the novel from Gilgamesh to William Gaddis, an <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Alternative History</span></strong></em>.) But the reinforcement of personal narrative as a cultural dominant in new media is what seems to have happened - if not in the early, important but relatively small-scale and short-lived experimentation of avant garde literary hypertext, then in the explosion of social networking media. At first glance, the persistence of narrative in new media can be dismissed as an imposition of a commercial ideology - in which all media has to be “mine,” with the same possessive individualism we are taught to bring to purchased goods and sexual relationships. More generally, however, the emergence of the personal narrative in new media can be understood as a powerful development in what James Phelan (who knows a thing or two about narrative structuring) calls its current tendency toward “imperialism.”</p>
<p>The persistence of narrative in new media is an artifact of our own individual desire, not yet outlived and not to be outdone by new media, <em><span class="lightEmphasis">to be great</span></em>.</p>
<p>Let us now place before our eyes the new media virtuoso of our present age. Is she not the most connected, and hence imperious, of personalities in contemporary history? It is true that she has cultivated in herself such a tenderness and sensitivity for all of humankind, and for her nothing human is distant. The most different times and people ring out at once from her screen in harmonious tones. She is active daily in signing petitions and following news of revolutions worldwide - not as this news is broadcast by old media, but as it is received through a Facebook or Twitter feed by those on the ground, people who linked in or signed up a mere decade, a few years, or maybe some days later than she. She has become part of a tuneful, interactive thing, which through its resounding tone also works on other actors of the same type, until suddenly the entire air of an age is full of such delicate reverberations, twanging away in concord.</p>
<p>But, in my view, in every original narrative chord we hear only its overtone, so to speak: the sturdiness of power in its violent origins can no longer be sensed in the celestially thin and sharp sound of the strings. Whereas the original tone usually aroused actions, needs, and terrors, this birdlike twittering lulls us to sleep and makes us weak hedonists, as the pressing and heartfelt news today from Egypt or Syria gives way tomorrow to equally pressing news from northern Japan, struck by a tsunami, from the oil-polluted Gulf, or from regions closer to our own affective political life in the United States:</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis"><em>Joy, you won’t believe what they said.</em> </span></p>
<blockquote><p>Dear Joy,</p>
<p> Since Monday, more than 50,000 ColorOfChange members have called on Psychology Today to address its decision to run an article that uses false science to argue that Black women are “objectively” less attractive than women of other races. Still, they’ve remained silent.</p>
<p> Can you help us get to 70,000? It takes a second to add your voice to the call, demanding PT apologize and explain how this won’t happen again. Once we get to 70,000, we’ll deliver your petitions to Psychology Today’s headquarters to increase the pressure.</p>
<p> Thanks and Peace,</p>
<p> – Rashad, James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Matt, Natasha, and the rest of the ColorOfchange.org team (received at Joseph Tabbi’s email account on May 26th, 2011)</p></blockquote>
<p>It is as if we have arranged the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">Ode to Joy</span></em> for two flutes and now we use it to entertain dreamy opium smokers. By that we may now measure among the new media virtuosi how things will stand concerning the highest demands of global humankind for a loftier and purer justice; this virtue never has anything pleasant, knows no attractive feelings, and is hard and terrifying.</p>
<h2>III</h2>
<p>Without question, there is a kind of greatness in new media’s global connectivity and its organization of human attention. That individual users of new media can also believe that their own lives, through participation in new media, can be “great,” is a powerful display of the imperialism of narrative in new media.</p>
<p>Does any of this create knowledge, however? What if we reach 70,000 and demand of British Petroleum to explain how similar eruptions won’t happen again? They have science on their side, or at least, the majority of scientists in the Gulf are on their payroll and prevented by terms of their contract from publishing what they know, and presenting it to possible falsification under peer review.</p>
<p>Does any of it make history? A decade or so after the so-called “Internet Revolutions,” we find the Suharto family and their old network still comfortably situated in Indonesia and wielding influence; Yanakovitch in Ukraine, whose attempt to steal the presidential vote triggered the 2002 mass gathering in Kiev’s Independence Square, is currently in power in Ukraine. Mubarak has stepped down. And?</p>
<p>Does any of it make us happy? That is doubtful, and was doubted by Nietzsche when he contrasted the forgetful lives of animals with our own, often debilitating, historical consciousness. In any case, happiness rarely has much to do with greatness: the small, unnoticed being in the moment, if only it is uninterrupted and makes one happy, is incomparably more happiness than the greatest which comes only as a newly mediated episode, as a mood, so to speak, as an amazing interruption between nothing but boredom, desire, and deprivation.</p>
<p>However, with the smallest and with the greatest happiness there is always one way in which happiness fulfills itself: through the ability to forget, or, to express the matter in a more scholarly fashion, through the capacity, for as long as the happiness lasts, to sense things without registering them in narrative and <em><span class="lightEmphasis">without mediation</span></em>. Anyone who cannot set herself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting the need to report one’s whereabouts and post one’s photos to one’s fellows; anyone who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory; whoever cannot look a passerby in the eye, without raising one’s mobil to the ear; she who cannot move in mixed company without busily texting a pre-approved contact, will never know what happiness is, and, even worse, she will never do anything to make other people happy.</p>
<h2>IV</h2>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">If literature and its institutions are to survive as more than an elitist nuisance, then reading and writing need to be made attractive and desirable in a communications and cultural environment where they must compete for attention with other media. Their desirability can only result from being used to do what they do well and what other media do less well. The mediatic specificity of reading, writing, and of literature, their potential niche in the new mediasphere, lies in their being made of language, which is a virtually universal human possession: everyone can respond in kind to works in language and talk back to them. Everyone can use language to speak, to think, and to play.</span> </em></p>
<p>(William Paulson)</p></blockquote>
<p>When Nietzsche cites Goethe, he is entering, not Goethe’s mind exactly, but an inscription of a thought that Goethe thought worth recording, in words that made sense to him at a given moment in a given time. The difference between what seems natural to Nietzsche in his contemporary German, and what seemed right for Goethe, is a measure of their affiliation and difference, more objective than any wholly conceptual similarity or contrast. The differences we experience today, in a questionably translated and freely rewritten revision of Nietzsche’s words, is a measure of the conceptual distance we have come from this author, whose words seem to have been only waiting all this time for new media, to realize themselves.</p>
<p>This is not a “dialogue” so much as the continuation of a thought from the past into present consciousness. Such thought is untimely. It happens exclusively in language.</p>
<p>If new media is ever going to be literary, it too needs to make intersubjective events happen in language. That is the only way to locate the literary in new media - in reading, and writing, and with the remixing of published words of our chosen antecedents.</p>
<p>The choice cannot be neutral, like a sampling in music or ironic allusion in modern literature: what is chosen needs to be believed in, made continuous with our own thought - otherwise we will have produced nothing more than a continuation of newness for its own sake; nothing more, that is, than what is already being produced by new media. And how, exactly, is the remix currently imagined? I am reminded of something a friend told me, when recounting a remix artist’s description of his work: “ ‘imagine being able to put Elton John in a headlock, put a beat behind him and pour a beer on his head.’ <em><span class="lightEmphasis">He was describing his work process of creating music through mashup, and while we might not call this writing (as in writing music?), he might. His description is amazingly metaphoric, and yet literal in a strange way.</span></em>” (Maria Engberg, email to Joseph Tabbi, 5 June 2011).</p>
<p>The headlock is more than a metaphor of the false objectification of an intersubjective process. Since the mashup, more often than not, means never encountering - not even in imagination - the thought that went into a work’s composition.</p>
<p>Contrast the remix artist’s objective locking of heads, with another, pre-digital remix produced by Robert Wyatt - a setting to music of the sampled words of Karl Marx, whose content is relevant also to the present discussion:</p>
<blockquote><p>FREE WILL AND TESTAMENT</p>
<p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">Given free will but within certain limitations.<br /> I cannot will myself to limitless mutations.<br /> I cannot know what I would be if I were not me.<br /> I can only guess me.</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Here we have not a headlock, but rather a kind of thinking in step with one’s literary antecedent - and we have, also, one of the best summaries I know of what we might call (following Nietzsche, who is in turn followed by the cognitive philosopher, Catherine Malabou) the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">plastic force</span></em> of personality. Such plasticity is manifested, not in a narrative of oneself or the enactment of one’s own limitless freedom to cite and repurpose anything in the archive. Plasticity emerges rather in an ability to inhabit the archive through a process of reading and writing under constraint.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">So when I say that I know me, how can I know that?<br /> What kind of spider understands arachnophobia.</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>The critical exercise, too, needs to be more than a demonstration of new media’s infinite archival capacities; it needs to demonstrate more than the flexibility of labor and new media’s limitless freedom to remix the archive. Can we not instead look to new media for expressions of our thought’s plasticity in the course of literary history? In order to determine this degree of history and, through that, the borderline at which a past literature must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we would have to know precisely how great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is. I mean that force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of oneself.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">I have my senses and my sense of having senses.<br /> Do I guide them? Or they me?</span></em></p></blockquote>
<h2>V</h2>
<p>Why cannot this untimely thought-exchange happen through image, sound, the tactile senses, even music? One reason that our early theorizations of new media writing were based on hyper<em><span class="lightEmphasis">texts</span></em>, is that it took some years for visuals and sounds to achieve fluency in new media. The transfer of these sizable files was a bit of a strong-man act, early on. Now that it can be done fairly easily and without counting megabytes, for anyone who can afford commercially available platforms, the textual in new media is back to its usual, marginal place in an overall media ecology.</p>
<p>But can we not inhabit earlier minds in image and sound with anything like the confidence with which we inhabit a written text? This is doubtful, and not because we under-value the visual and sonic arts in new media. Coetzee in <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Summertime</span></strong></em>, depicting himself (as he imagines others saw him) in the years before his own greatness, has the highest possible opinion of the musical arts:</p>
<blockquote><p><span class="lightEmphasis"><em>One night John arrived in an unusually excited state. He had with him a little cassette player, and put on a tape, the Schubert string quintet. It was not what I would call sexy music, nor was I particularly in the mood, but he wanted to make love, and specifically - excuse the explicitness - wanted us to co-ordinate our activities to the music, to the slow movement.</em> </span></p></blockquote>
<p>The slow movement of the quintet, as John Coetzee instructs his lover, “happens to be about fucking.” And not about sex in general, but about what it felt like for women and men to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria.</p>
<p>His lover, Julia, thinks otherwise. For her the man’s tempo, keyed to the music, is just slow and in any case the activity is meaningless without any foreplay between the living lovers. Reflecting further, Julia suspects that John, who was otherwise adequate sexually, nonetheless suffered a kind of sexual “autism.” <em><span class="lightEmphasis">Characteristically</span></em>, she says, <em><span class="lightEmphasis">the autistic type treats other people as automata, mysterious automata. In return he expects to be treated reciprocally as the object of your desire.</span></em></p>
<p>What the fictional John Coetzee could not achieve through his applied theory of sexuality through the ages, the author, J. M. Coetzee, accomplishes with his imagination, and he does this exclusively through <em><span class="lightEmphasis">written</span></em> language. Specifically, he achieves not a dialogue but a potential thought continuum, in his imagination of words his lover might have spoken to a third party (the young biographer, who can explore these recollected intimacies now that “Coetzee” is dead and so can no longer feel insulted). In this way, the literary author overcomes the automatism of his earlier, entirely sensual communication, by imagining how his lover can have imagined <em><span class="lightEmphasis">him</span></em>:</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">[With John], I never had the feeling that he was with me, me in all my reality. Rather, it was as if he was engaged with some erotic image of me inside his head; perhaps even with some image of Woman with a capital W.</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Is this a narrative effect? Is it episodic? It shares with narrative, the creation of a continuity - but the continuity belongs all on the side of language, not life experience or the accumulation of knowledge. It is episodic in the same sense that any sexual encounter is an episode, not recoverable in memory in anything matching the momentary experience. Words, precisely because they are detached from the senses, <em><span class="lightEmphasis">are</span></em> capable of evoking one admittedly small component of experience - namely, the thought we experience while writing, which is experienced again by another, while reading.</p>
<p>Impatient with mere textual knowledge, theorists nowadays look to sound, image, and the human body itself as sources of affect - all the more powerful because present, or at least accessible, in new media. But as Coetzee’s lover Julia confirms, the avoidance of discourse (the slow, mostly verbal “foreplay”), and the favoring of immediate and direct sensual experience can actually limit the sensual imagination. It is a kind of sexual autism, in Julia’s word; a race for eunuchs, as Nietzsche puts it in his usual, tactful way. For a eunuch, as for John with his over-theorized erotic image, one woman is as good as another. Each woman is for him, in effect, merely a woman, the woman-in-itself, the eternally unapproachable, and so what drives him is something indifferent, so long as love-making itself remains splendidly “objective” and, of course protected precisely by the sort of people who could never make love, or history, themselves.</p>
<p>And since the eternally feminine will never draw the affective theorist upward, he then pulls her down to himself and assumes, since he is neutered, that history is also neutral. However, so that people do not think that I am serious in comparing history with the eternally feminine, I wish to express myself much more clearly: I consider that history is the opposite of the eternally masculine, but for those who theorize the living feminine body as itself a kind of writing, a vessel of narratives, then sexuality as such must be quite unimportant. Either way, when presenting writing as a sensuous affect, such people are themselves neither male nor female; they are not something common to both; nor are they authors of narratives that can only be understood exclusively by brothers or sisters of the same sex. What they are is neither male nor female, not sexual at all nor even gendered, but always and forever neuter or, to express myself in a more educated way, they are just the eternally objective.</p>
<h2>VI</h2>
<p>The term of preference for the above-mentioned condition, in new media scholarship today, might be “object oriented.”</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and <strong><span class="booktitle">Harry Potter</span></strong>, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>That definition was not published; like much new media scholarship today it was rather presented in a blog with the intention of further revision for the purpose of a more widespread communication through journalists and other media representatives, particularly those who do not read philosophy. Thus, as ever, the widest net requires the most specialized language - namely, that which can be understood by anyone who conveys a thought universally through new media. After collective deliberation, the authors of this definition evidently decided to drop <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Harry Potter</span></strong></em> and to offer a clearer location of their own “ontology” within the sphere of “contemporary thought” - insofar as schools of thought can be named, reduced to this or that un-ambivalent position, and so made to circulate (with OOO itself) in new media:</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves [sic].</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Structurally, the field is neutralized at the start because, whether or not a fictional object is listed, and regardless of that object’s quality, “everything exists equally.” We have, in the eyes and orifices of OOO, a kind of eternally and universally unapproachable being-in-itself consistent with the eternally feminine described by Nietzsche. But there is also a rhetorical neutering, that has to do with the tendency in new media to write collectively - and so implicitly obliging anyone wishing to respond to the definition, to read through all that talk, lest a viewpoint should be neglected or, worse, disrespected. Even so, it is unlikely that any true scholar will take on that task, since her late arrival (days, months, or years after the conversation has played out), would require re-starting the discussion and then possibly responding to every new objection or nuance brought in by the old consort, as well as by members newly arrived. But the purpose of blog discussion is not, in any case, to arrive at truth but rather to create a representative and rhetorically effective statement, for circulation in the widest public sphere. Respect for the collectivity is the only requirement for participation and no post will be rejected so long as it maintains its respectful demeanor. The inclusion or exclusion of a “fictive object” - what is clearly marginalized by the proposed ontological discourse - is not debated, and nobody is so crass as to express an opinion on the literary quality of <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Harry Potter</span></strong></em>. All that’s noted, is the book’s potential for controversy, so “it might not be the best rhetorical move to put that point in such a short description. Unless that’s precisely the reason to do it.”</p>
<p>Such discussions are essential to the development of a thought, an electronic construction, an interactive site - anything that can be used as a foundation for further construction, further thought. Such discussions are like the notes drafted in the margins of an essay (from which for example the present essay was constructed). Like these notes from earlier media engagements, the blog discussions should be discarded, and forgotten. They are essential to history, essential that is to the documents and constructions that are the historical scholar’s proper field of reference. But they are not historical documents in themselves, except for the most cloying biographical and fanatically oriented mass cultural scholarship. The dust of biographical rubbish. Like the notes and marginal scrawls that preceded them in print media, such materials should be kept private, used for internal discussion and not preserved for literary analysis.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">The weight of dust exceeds the weight of settled objects.<br /> What can it mean, such gravity without a center?</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Worse still: the blog, as a vehicle of new media scholarship, has the effect of internalizing criticism, giving no more “special status” to the one who seeks a truth or stakes out a position than to the person whose formulation is designed, primarily, to bring terms into wider circulation within new media. Of course, distinctions are made in practice and the discourse of this particular blog has the ring of one status in particular - namely, that of contemporary corporate culture, where the above-cited “elevator pitch” of Object Oriented Ontology is directed, primarily. The proliferation of voices and visions itself ensures that the literary object will not be allowed a special, media specific voice of its own, even if literature has proven its capacity to extend thoughts beyond present conversations toward a continuing intersubjective process. Instead, literature is observed only in its external objecthood, even as the proliferation of any number of other “objects” for study neutralizes the critical impulse to select <em><span class="lightEmphasis">this</span></em> object, rather than another, in support of <em><span class="lightEmphasis">this</span></em> worldview rather than another. What we have, instead, is a worldview that embraces being indiscriminately, the way Nietzsche’s neutered historian embraces not a desired object, but only the eternally feminine. Woman with a capital W, so to speak: Ontology with its capital O’s.</p>
<h2>VII</h2>
<p>Unlike the imagined audience for a work of print literature, which is abstract and broadcast, our electronic correspondence is absolutely particular and receptive. Each recipient is an individual, with her own culture and interests, even “passionate interests” (Latour) that can be formulated in conversation, aggregated mathematically, and valued according to the expressed or recognized interests of others. Esteem, as much as anything, can now be calculated in new media. But this individuality, unlike the individualism associated with print literacy, is wholly objective (or, rather, “object oriented” in the terms of Latour’s followers in new media). The conventional privacy of an extended encounter with a printed text has not much traction in new media; neither does the reserve that one brings to cosmopolitan discourse. In new media, we have instead of privacy, security: protective passwords, protocols that allow or disallow contacts, profiles that reveal parts of ourselves in transaction with others - particularly, those who share our orientation toward particular objects, and objectives, in life.</p>
<p>Interiority is not lost in new media transactions; to the contrary, a subject’s personal aspects are minutely defined and capable of extended refinement through online conversation. The passions, including the passions of crowds, are wholly capable of being treated mathematically, thus transforming economic calculations of a group’s productive capacity. But only that which is namable, narratable, countable, and available for exchange is real. What is not transacted, what is not translatable, is not present in new media.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">Sheer momentum makes us act this way or that way.<br /> We just invent, or just assume a motivation.</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>Formerly, with the rise of the novel and expansion of print literacy, our imagined communities, and an author’s primary audience, tended to attach themselves to a national vision. The nation was, admittedly, a very abstract entity (one could not know every person in a nation the way one could know, for example, the people in one’s neighborhood; one could not envision a nation the way one could visualize, say, a town or a city). Hence the need, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, to <em><span class="lightEmphasis">imagine</span></em> the national community. Participation in the nation was facilitated in most cases by a single national language. Precisely because of these linguistic constraints on a sizable population, nations could aspire to a more or less universal literacy over a designated geographical area. Its authors could cultivate national literatures, the better to form cosmopolitan networks among distinct nations, through which authors could discover sympathetic expressions (in other languages) and refine differences in competition with other national literatures. The constraints of the nation were not necessarily provincial; indeed, as we know Goethe had envisioned an idea of a “universal world Literature in the process of formation” only after observing how his own works had been received in France. (Cited in Prendergast 3) Goethe’s sense of “a common world literature transcending national limits” was not, and by its defining terms could not be, offered as a personal vision so much as a recognition of new modes of cultural “traffic” (Hoesel-Uhlig, cited in Prendergast 2). This, too, the means of trans-national circulation not the striving for transparency and understanding among different languages, remains the basis for the desired construction of a world literature in new media<cite id="note_5" class="note">See Tabbi, “Electronic Literature.”</cite>; but its realization (never robust in print, admittedly), is doubly frustrated in new media because one’s aesthetic, subjective, and otherwise “passionate interests” have been transformed (with remarkable success) into objective elements available for exchange.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis"> Be in the air, but not be air, be in the no air. <br /> Be on the loose, neither compacted nor suspended. <br /> Neither born nor left to die.</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>The idea of a market not for commodities exclusively but for the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">passionate interests</span></em> of men and woman who have formed networks, is not born with new media. Indeed, Latour shows how in the nineteenth century, the “undisciplined” mind of the French economist, Tarde, produced something very like a network theory of exchange. Such a theory, which is neither socialist nor capitalist, is decidedly object oriented, even when the object in question is an individual’s passion, or an individual’s life narrative. The clear power of such an approach is that value is designated in cultural areas at the point where they reach expression by individuals. Subjectivity, it turns out, can be treated mathematically after all - so long as our thoughts find expression in, and are channeled through, new media.</p>
<h2>VIII</h2>
<p>My argument is this - we have preserved everything in electronic formats available to forensics but unavailable to minds engaged in the thought expressed in past works of literature. Our knowing is “object-oriented” rather than cognitive. All history is made present without difference; all history is personalized, and hence past writing is lost to literature and to life.</p>
<p>This is not an argument against the commodification of culture. The attachment of passions and subjectivity to objects is not at all the same as commodity fetishism: rather, one’s feelings themselves take objective form in new media. And so, even the most passing thought, or the smallest episode in a life, can be itself the object of present memory and hence is capable of continuing transactions within the media they objectively inhabit. In new media, an ever greater portion of the world population is coming to live <em><span class="lightEmphasis">historically</span></em>. Whether this transformation can bring more happiness to more people is doubtful, from a Nietzschean perspective.</p>
<p>But we can, nonetheless, rework that perspective - in a palimpsest of Nietzsche’s words and our own, and in an electronic medium specific to our time.</p>
<p>In doing so, our machines also work on our thoughts. How often during the composition of this essay has my word processing program reminded me of the many, many ways that the name Nietzsche can be misspelled? How frequently am I made aware of deviance from current parlance, each time I transcribe the philosopher’s translated words? How many improbable, useful evolutions in a given word or usage are frustrated this way, by dutiful scribes conforming to current usage enforced by the authority of new media?</p>
<p>Imagine the most extreme example, a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see everywhere, in any object, a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in her own being. no longer believes in herself, sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other, and loses herself in this stream of becoming. She will, finally, hardly dare any more to lift her finger from the keyboard or touch-screen.</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span class="lightEmphasis">I would disperse, be disconnected. Is that possible?</span></em></p></blockquote>
<p>For Nietzsche writing in the late nineteenth century, Goethe’s German must have seemed already an idiom fixed and usable in the present not only for its sentiment (a “spirit” or spur to life and action) but also for its <em><span class="lightEmphasis">resistance</span></em> to Nietzsche’s own age - a resistance embodied in the words themselves and kept alive in Nietzsche’s own consciousness at the time of reading, and with the act of citation potentially carried forward to later minds re-reading the citation and reconsidering the consequences drawn by Nietzsche in his philosophical writings.</p>
<p>Nothing prevents our similar engagement today. But we need to engage not with being in its entirety, but rather with the entire body of past print literature and and current, born-digital writing.</p>
<p>With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the literary potential of new media, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-culture of the age.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>WORKS CITED AND FREELY SAMPLED</h3>
<p>Anderson, Benedict (1991). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Imagined Communities</span></strong></em>. London: Verso.</p>
<p>Bogost, Ian. “What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A definition for ordinary folk.” ONLINE at <a href="http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml">http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml</a> (accessed May 29-31, 2011).</p>
<p>Casanova, Pascal (2004). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The World Republic of Letters</span></strong></em>. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Boston: Harvard University Press.</p>
<p>Coetzee, J. M. (2009). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Summertime</span></strong></em>. New York: Penguin.</p>
<p>Heckman, Davin (2011). “The Disturbed Dialectic of Literary Criticism in an Age of Innovation.” <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Leonardo…</span>.</strong></em></p>
<p>John, Adrian (1998). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</span></strong></em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p>
<p>Horton, Scott (August 2008). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Harper’s</span></strong></em>. ONLINE at <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001025">http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001025</a> (Accessed 31 May 2011).</p>
<p>Kirshenbaum, Matt. Mechanisms: <em><strong><span class="booktitle">New Media and the Forensic Imagination</span></strong></em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008.</p>
<p>Moore, Steven (2010). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Novel: An Alternative History</span></strong></em>. New York: Continuum.</p>
<p>Latour, Bruno, and Vincent Antonin Lépinay (2010). <span class="booktitle"><em><strong>The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology</strong></em>.</span> Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.</p>
<p>Paulson, William (2001). <span class="booktitle"><em><strong>Literary Culture In a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities</strong></em>.</span> Ithaca: Cornell University Press.</p>
<p>Phelan, James (2005). “Editor’s Column: Who’s Here? Thoughts on Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism.” <em><strong>Nattative</strong></em> 13.3: 2005-10.</p>
<p>Predergast, Christopher, Ed. (2004). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Debating World Literature</span></strong></em>. New York: Norton.</p>
<p>Steiner, George (1960). <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Tolstoy or Dostoevski</span></strong></em>. London: Faber and Faber.</p>
<p>Strawson, Galen (2004). “Against Narrativity.” <em><strong>Ratio</strong></em> (new series) XVII 4 December.</p>
<p>Tabbi, Joseph (Spring 2010). “Electronic Literature as World Literature, or: The Universality of Writing Under Constraint.” <em><strong>Poetics Today</strong></em> 31.1: 17-50 . Special issue eds. Hans Baetans and Jens-Jacques Poucel.</p>
<p>Wyatt, Robert (1977). “Free Will and Testament.” <em><strong>His Greatest Misses</strong></em> (2004). ONLINE at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv_F29h_qxM">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv_F29h_qxM</a></p>
</div>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/new-media">new media</a>, <a href="/tags/critic">critic</a>, <a href="/tags/ontology">ontology</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/digital">digital</a>, <a href="/tags/born-digital">born-digital</a>, <a href="/tags/nientzsche">nientzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/community">community</a>, <a href="/tags/literature">literature</a>, <a href="/tags/marx">marx</a>, <a href="/tags/marxism">marxism</a>, <a href="/tags/free-will">free will</a>, <a href="/tags/imagination">imagination</a>, <a href="/tags/ooo">ooo</a>, <a href="/tags/authorship">authorship</a>, <a href="/tags/deconstruction">deconstruction</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a></div></div></div>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:01:34 +0000EBR Administrator2073 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com